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David Mitchell
Joe,
This is so weird.
As to your waste to energy post - here is a strange tale - but true.
Years ago my dad met a new faculty friend who was a visiting professor at Ohio State from Engand by the name of Dr. Noel McCaulliffe - a brilliant (and hilariously funny) Chemical Engineering scientist. He began doing a visiting professor series for a semester or a quarter every year from his home universty in Manchester England - The University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology - (U.M.I.S.T. as it is commonly refered to over there).
The freindship grew, and on ensuing visits Mom and Dad would have him stay with them at our house instead of paying for housing. (It was after my sisters and I were all gone and the house was "empty"). And before long Noel was bringing his wife to stay. And then Mom and Dad visited them and were escorted all over Central England and Wales.
Noel and a partner professor back home were working on a revolutionary technology to convert cellulosic waste (paper, plants, lumber waste, green yard waste and many other odd things) into oil. We listened to the "talk" for a few years and I decided to see if we could get inviolved and help fund the development of their unique "process". Dad agreed to get involved financially - up to a point.
Dad paid for Noel and his fellow professor, from England, plus me and a best friend Lawyer from Denver, and Dad from Columbus to all fly to Auburn Universtiy for a weekend where we would witness a small "static batch" test of their process. (Auburn was the home of another of Noel's friends where he also did guest lectures at their Engineering school for several years. )
With Dad's funding, (the small autoclave itself cost $9,000) we witnessed the input and output of a small sample process - (a couple pounds of fine ground pulversized cellulosic waste material). Then the post process resulting material was given to another Auburn professor (another friend) to analyze the chemical "crack" (scientific breakdown of the oil product) that resulted.
The results were astounding!
About 60+ percent percentage of oil with very a high BTU (British Thermal Units) value, with almost no sulpher, and a very clean inert waste that was excellent for asphalt production. A high powered patent attorney from a big tech patent Law firm in San Francisco read a copy of the Lab analysis results that I had sent him and he was almost speechless when we spoke on the phone - "If this does what these test results show, you're looking at the technological break through of the Century".
After that my dad paid for my friend Bob and I to fly to Gothenburg, Sweden for a 4 day world conference on "Bio- Energy" (about 1984?) to get us up to speed on what all was out there in this world of alterntive energy. We were two total illiterates in the field of science but did we ever get an education - an absolutely mind boggling (and exhuasting) four days of lectures and question-and-answer "workshops" that I will never forget. (and all going on in many languages, with scientists volunteering spontaneously from the audience to stand up and translate - back and forth - sometimes between 3 or 4 different languages on the same question.
This was timed to be immediately before Bob and I would fly back to London and drive a rental car up to Manchester to meet with Noel's entire team, including two fascinating guys who had been life-long top executives with British Oxygen (once the world largest corporation) in building a Nuclear plant in South Africa and the orient.
And then the whole thing began to unravel. After all this planning, and all of the money Dad had forked over, the meetings in Manchester went strange. It was suddenly "not possible" for us to be taken down to the basement of the univesrity building (at Salford University - a partner in the project with UMIST) to see the much larger "continous flow" model that they had been running for over a year -- or so they said?
That was the whole purpose of our trip!
After Bob and I returned home, Noel stopped answering his phone and made no more trips to the states to teach at Ohio State. He would not even answer Dad's letters. Dad was crushed. Not so much because of the money but that he'd lost his "other son". One of the other partners and I stayed in touch for years (and became good friends that I could stay with on my later Antique buying forays). He could only tell me that Noel had started drinking (again - we didn't know ther had been a "before") and had left his wife and three adorable kids, and moved in with a female student less than half his age.
He sent us an article in a British financial magazine a few years later where Noel had licensed the technology to a British bank to use on their returned canceled checks and paperwork. On a later trip for my antique business, that remaining good freind told me he heard a rumor that the Bank had mishandled the building of the processing plant and given up on the investment.
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Some of you may know the details better than I, but I recall that the City of Columbus once (in the 70's?) paid the City of Munich Germany an enormous sum (like $500 million) to license a technology that woud convert the City's trash to a form of power furnace. But it was based on the separation of the incomming trash - metal, plastic, glass etc., and burn only the cellulosic part of the garbage - similar to our British friend's process.
(Fred, are you out there ??????)
Munich had also inveted in a front-end "separation" system where the other particles (metal, glass, plastic, etc.) were removed before allowing the pure cellulosic stuff to get into the furnaces. Without that, the mixed garbage would catch on fire prematurely, melt the metal and plastic, clog the fan grates, and ruin the entire process - and the equipment. They could not convince Columbus to pay for that part of the process and Columbus attempted to use their own human system of separation - an inefficient method at best.
It's my understanding that the system quikcly produced fires and several major explosions - killing a couple of employees. The City (or the City Council?) voted to abandon the project and kissed off the hundreds of millions of cost.
I can assure you this much - cellulosic plants and their derivatives are full of energy!
(Mike M. - do you think this might finally put me in the running for the most boring post award?)
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